Israel-Gaza war

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Israel could have taken Gaza in like a week way back in October, not worried too much about degrading infrastructure or whatever before they'd established on-the-ground control, and then conducted the rest of this war as a counterinsurgency. They lost politically and morally as soon as they decided not to do that, even though they're winning militarily. This is a real shame from any perspective other than hating Israel so much so that you're willing to tolerate astronomical amounts of human suffering for the sake of discrediting the (((Zios))), which some people do but which I don't think describes anyone currently participating in this conversation.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Regarding the refugee thing, the various Arab governments have long had a choice between being complicit in the displacement of the Palestinians and being complicit in their mistreatment within Palestine. It made some degree of sense that they had a tradition of strongly preferring the latter when that mistreatment didn't rise to the level of Palestinian civilians being blown to smithereens day in and day out, but now that it does, the refusal to change course is 1. very obviously maliciously intended on the part of the Arab governments and 2. just plain strange. This isn't how we assess any other refugee crisis on the planet.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Regarding the refugee thing, the various Arab governments have long had a choice between being complicit in the displacement of the Palestinians and being complicit in their mistreatment within Palestine. It made some degree of sense that they had a tradition of strongly preferring the latter when that mistreatment didn't rise to the level of Palestinian civilians being blown to smithereens day in and day out, but now that it does, the refusal to change course is 1. very obviously maliciously intended on the part of the Arab governments and 2. just plain strange. This isn't how we assess any other refugee crisis on the planet.

Not really when you consider that the global Islamist movement hates them too.

Who is "them" here, the Arab governments or the Palestinians?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Netanyahu's hands get redder every time more of the hostages turn up dead. Not as red as Hamas's, at least not in this particular way, but redder.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Netanyahu's hands get redder every time more of the hostages turn up dead. Not as red as Hamas's, at least not in this particular way, but redder.

He can't leave soon enough, but I'm not convinced that Hamas didn't just kill the remaining hostages after the first cease-fire broke down.

That's a real and distressing possibility as well, yeah.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Do you actually think this would end peacefully?

This is the big problem with binationalism even though it's probably the "correct" solution from left-liberal first principles, and one does see an awful lot of noble-savage-adjacent rhetoric these days about trusting the Palestinians to do a U-turn on whether or not they want to massacre AL-YAHUD out of the goodness of their hearts. It's probably insoluble short of a Bosnia or Northern Ireland arrangement backed up and enforced by a massive and more or less permanent international security presence, which I get closer and closer to supporting as my own preferred outcome by the day.